For some time now, Jumpcut has been Active's video provider. As some of you may be aware, Yahoo has decided to shelve Jumpcut and they are no longer accepting video uploads. The decision to halt uploads came as a surprise to us; we were notified only a week prior. Since our video migration is scheduled in early 2009, this leaves us in the unfortunate position of turning off video uploads on the Active website. We are trying our best to retrieve the current video content and will restore functionality soon.

Active.com currently uses Jumpcut as its video provider. With support for Jumpcut waning, we have decided to move our content to a new provider – BrightCove. BrightCove offers a newly updated product and an extensive API. We have already begun implementing BrightCove’s video player on some of our pages (see our Tour de France page) and we look forward to working with their services.

The difficulty, of course, is always in the details. You can see from our video edit page that Jumpcut allows videos to be edited within a web browser. These edits are stored by Jumpcut and when a video is requested, the finalized version is created on the fly and shown in a flash viewer. The current issue is one of retrieval. What is an effective method for making these videos downloadable? Requests to Jumpcut for this information have not been forthcoming.

Interestingly, another website, ClipNabber, allows users to download flash videos from video providers such as YouTube, Yahoo Videos, and Jumpcut. There are some Jumpcut limitations which prevent us from retrieving all of our content, but we can at least begin the process with some of our videos.

Once this issue of retrieval is resolved we can copy the content, titles and descriptions for transfer into BrightCove. More to come as we dive deeper into the migration process!